I pick up the 
fountain pen and begin to write. Long-forgotten images bubble out of the deep recesses of my memory. A classroom perfumed with chalk dust. Rows of wooden tables polished to a fine patina by generations of students and scarred by the tips of their compasses. A hole in the top right corner for an ink bottle I never had — but my father did, and his father before him. The feeling of the fountain pen gliding on the page.
There is raw beauty in the way the ink flows from the nib before settling on the page and slowly soaking into the paper. Something you will never get with a boring ballpoint pen, a soft felt pen, or even a smooth gel pen. They deliver the ink too evenly, predictably. There is an art to writing with a fountain pen, a mystical dance between hand, ink, nib, and paper. It’s a personal, almost sensual experience. No one was allowed to write with my pen.
No matter how hard I tried to keep them clean, my fingertips were baptized with fresh ink stains every day. I carried my fountain pen in a pencil case meticulously stored in a well-organized schoolbag, but the bag itself kept moving. Shoulder to floor, floor to shoulder, a bit of running here and there, and the occasional friendly kick from a classmate. Shaking made tiny droplets of ink splash inside the cap, then onto the tip of the pen before finally landing on my fingers. Cleaning the pen’s tip and nib with a tissue or blotting paper only helped a little, and every night after putting down my schoolbag and taking off my coat, I went straight to the bathroom to scrub my hands with a pumice stone.
Blue was my color of choice. I found blue-black too dark and black too… black. I secretly coveted turquoise blue ink but could never muster to courage to use it because boys dismissed it as “girly”. Being top of the class was reason enough to get teased: I did not dare to choose an ink color that would put my masculinity in question.
How did we kids manage to write anything without a keyboard and a backspace key? When we misspelled, scribbled hieroglyphs instead of roman letters, or simply changed our mind, the only option was to cross out the undesired words, and then carry on. Whatever you crossed out stayed right here on the page for anyone to see.
Actually, that’s not true. We had erasable ink – maybe the real reason why I used blue instead of black. So, we could make a mistake or change our mind once. The white tip of the eraser pen would make mistakes disappear, and the blue tip would allow you to rewrite on top. But the shade of blue was different, so the observant reader knew you had erased something.
And so, on test days most kids first wrote a draft then took a new sheet to rewrite the final paper – a process I always considered a waste of time. Instead, I gathered my thoughts for a few minutes before taking the pen, then I just wrote. In one go, I would write entire essays then leave the classroom early. Of course, such arrogance did wonders for my popularity.
Dissertations were my favorite exercise, one I excelled at. My secret ingredient to win over even the grumpiest teacher: fake quotes. Reading books and magazines gave me a vernacular about the lives and opinions of famous thinkers, just accurate enough to make up something they could have said. My fountain pen was the accomplice of so many quoting crimes.
The nib glides effortlessly. The pen has a will of its own. The kinesthetic act of writing, in its sheer pleasure, unlocks my creativity. No screen. No keyboard. Lately the act of writing has been contrived and laborious. I write a paragraph, sometimes not even a sentence, and I start editing it right away. Why not? The backspace key is right here, calling me.
But not today.
I am just writing, letting the fountain pen guide me. Sometimes I pause for a moment, not to edit but simply to look for inspiration. When I restart, the ink is darker for one or two letters, an indelible sign of this temporal interruption in the flow of words.
Turquoise blue is such a pretty color.
~Cedric, May 2020
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